You know by now that I love social media, because it’s accessible, free, and effective.
However, I don’t believe that ‘doing social media’ should take up your whole day.
In order to make sure that I am not a slave to my twitter feed I use a few nifty little tools and I want to share a few of those with you here. If you have any more that you’d like to add to the list, please let me know in the comments:
1. Your mobile phone. Whether you’re on Android, iPhone, Blackberry, or any other smartphone, if you’re not using your handheld device to help you manage your social media activity you are missing a trick. Once you take your social networking off your desktop and onto your phone, you have the ability to get social in those little bits of time that might otherwise be wasted, such as whilst waiting for the kettle to boil, being stood at the bus stop, or in the doctors waiting room.
2. Tweetdeck. This social dashboard is game-changing for everyone that I introduce it to. You add in your various social profiles, and then monitor and update them all from the same place. Powerful search and listing functions make Tweetdeck even more useful. My only complaint is that there is no Blackberry app (although there is one for iPhone and one for Android) and the iPad app is being redeveloped and is not currently available. Hoot suite does a similar job.
www.tweetdeck.com
3. FollowFridayHelper. On twitter it’s important to be nice to the people who are nice to you, and FollowFriday suggestions are one way to do that. FollowFridayHelper will tell you who’s been chatting to you on twitter lately so that you can give them a shout out with a #followfriday mention.
www.followfridayhelper.com
4. Bit.ly. On twitter particularly you have limited characters to play with, so you have to make your links as short as possible. Bit.ly will help you do that (and also track the amount of clicks and shares your link gets). With bit.ly http://www.tamsinfoxdavies.com/social-media-via-improv-everywhere/ becomes http://bit.ly/meaQVz. Good, huh?!
www.bit.ly
5. HyperAlerts. If you have a Facebook page for your business, you have to make sure that you respond to any comments that are made on your page by others. However, checking your page every 5 minutes to see if a comment has been left will just drive you crazy. Sign up for HyperAlerts and register your page and you will receive a regular email detailing all the new comments on your page, so you can reply to them. It’s better than facebooks own notification service because you decide when you want the update to come to you.
www.hyperalerts.com
What are your favourite social media tools?
May 15, 2011